Posts Tagged ‘Photoshop’

Last night a brilliant idea came to me in my dreams. Why not program the CCD sensor in your camera to mimic the effect of your favourite film stock? (if you can remember what film was.)

As is often the case, someone else had not only had the same idea but had done something about it, and what’s more, many, many years ago and far more intelligently than me. Instead of the insanely complex reprogramming of hardware, people have created Photoshop plug-ins that can mimic the film stock of yesteryear. But by experimenting with the Channel Mixer settings, you can replicate these yourself.

Years ago I set the fotoLibra subscription level at £6 as month because that was the cost of a roll of Fuji Velvia, the finest film for recording buildings in the British countryside because it loved doing greys and greens. And that’s all I photographed really, because as you all know I am NOT a photographer, I am just a bloke with a camera.

If you went to a fairground, or visited New England in the fall, or went on a beach holiday, the Velvia would be useless. Instead you’d be taking boxes and boxes of Kodachrome, incomparable with reds and yellows and oranges.

And now there are plug-ins, or Actions, or Channel Mixer tips available for many of your favourite film stocks. To show you how they work, I’ve hacked a couple of my own images about. Criticism of my work is NOT solicited or even permitted; these are simply examples to show the effects these Channel Mixers can achieve.

I am awed by the quality of work produced by fotoLibra’s contributors, and I’m diffident about offering any hints or tips to you, but some of you may have forgotten these tricks and might enjoy playing with them.

Original File

Velvia Effect

Kodachrome Effect

VELVIA EFFECT USING CHANNEL MIXERS

1. Layer> New Adjustment Layer> Channel Mixer> Click OK
2. Make these changes to each of the red, green, and blue sliders for each
output channel
3. These changes are guides which you can vary, but try and make sure the Total always = +100%

… if you don’t want to see a particularly gruesome image of the assassinated Osama bin Laden.

I’ve put it at the bottom of this blog so you don’t have to look at it without scrolling down, not for any vicarious pleasure, but for the simple purpose of showing what can be achieved with digital image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop (other digital image manipulation applications are available).

What purports to be the shocking photograph of the dead bin Laden which President Obama deemed too disturbing for public view has of course cropped up all over the place, mainly on right-wing conservative American websites. And they are truly scary (the websites, that is).

You will have read in previous postings on this blog that US courts do not allow digital photographic images as evidence because of the ease with which they can be manipulated. Actually as anyone who has battled with Photoshop will know, it’s not that easy, but a truly skilled Photoshop artist can make it look simple — and realistic.

The image is indeed shocking — until you look at the image on the right.

On the left you will see a purported photograph of Osama bin Laden after he stupidly opened the door to some visiting American gentlemen. On the right you will see a much nastier image — Osama bin Laden alive.

Compare the two images.

Look at the angle of the head.

Look at his ear; look at the highlight inside it.

Look at the highlight on the tip of his nose.

Look at his mouth hanging slackly open, doubtless in the process of delivering some deranged spittle-flecked invective.

The images are identical, except that in one he appears to have met with an accident.

It’s the same image. The one of the left has been Photoshopped — it’s a completely fraudulent image. I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is the image that Barack found too disturbing to release; that one is undoubtedly real and I’m sure it’s profoundly unpleasant.

But in lieu of having the real thing, some talented Photoshop artist has been employed to provide slaughter pron for slavering right-wingers. It’s very good — until some clever chappie like David Hoffman unearths the original image.

Unless of course Hoffman has been even smarter and recreated the image on the right from the original on the left!

Now you can see why American courts don’t permit digital images as evidence. The camera lies through its teeth.

After buying the spiffy new camera, the first accessory most photographers want to get their hands on is a mighty new lens.

It ain’t necessarily so.

This is a list of things photographers should buy in order to improve their sales. It is in the order of our suggested priorities at fotoLibra.

Remember, as a picture library / stock agency we’re not necessarily reading from the same page as our photographer friends. Most photographers want to create beautiful, stunning images, and of course we want to see those as well, but above all we want photographs that sell.

And if that interests you, then here is what we suggest you need to acquire.

A decent DSLR or large format digital camera. The make is unimportant, as long as you’re comfortable with it. One famous old tip to get comfortable is to put the camera in a bag, then put your hands in and spend days looking odd and learning how to use it blindfold. Feel your way round the apparatus. Learn to use it without thinking, so it becomes an automatic, natural extension of your eye. Nowadays the camera back should deliver a minimum of 12 mexapixels.

Adobe Photoshop, Elements, Corel Draw, GIMP, Irfanview or some other photo editing software. This is your digital darkroom. You must always shoot in RAW and then post process. It’s no use having a digital camera without photo editing software.

A tripod. Your hands shake, I promise you.

A subscription to fotoLibra. “Yeah, yeah, what a surprise,” you smile, but this is where you get regular lists of the photographs that buyers need, hints, tips, blogs and newsletters. A huge amount of storage space for your images. And all your sales and back office admin taken care of, leaving you to get on with pressing that shutter.

Lighting, unless you plan only to photograph landscapes by available light (a very small market). At the very least, a separate and moveable flash unit. The flash built in to the camera is strictly for amateurs.

A large roll of white paper to act as a neutral background, such as this. Professional picture buyers like plain backgrounds and cut outs. Cut outs are virtually impossible to achieve successfully without starting with a plain background.

And of course Goalposts, on which you put the paper. You get to move them, as well. Properly called a “background support system’. Here’s one.

Books from thefotoLibra Bookshop. I like the intelligent and elegantly designed Rocky Nook titles. You will never, ever stop learning as a photographer. Even Snowdon, one of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers, admits he’s still learning at eighty.

Photography courses, such as those offered by Nick Jenkins atFreespirit Images. You will learn tricks and techniques which would never have occurred to you on your own.

Apple Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. Post processing taken to new heights. I know it will hurt to spend money on bits and bytes before lovely, smooth, hefty glass and metal, but would you prefer to collect kit, or make a name for yourself as a photographer?

NOW you can start to splash out on more expensive lenses, camera bags and all that other non-essential kit. But armed with the Top Ten, you will have what you need to take photographs that SELL.

And my lens suggestion for when you finally buy a second?

Go for the widest aperture you can afford.

And if you don’t agree with this list, please post your own in the Comments!

I will not yield to anybody in my admiration for Adobe’s Photoshop. It is a stunning piece of software, and anyone who uses a digital camera for anything more than snapshots must have a copy — and use it.

I am less enamoured with Adobe, the corporation. It’s well known that I and many others abhor their commercial decision to charge 37% more for their recently released Creative Suite 5 in the UK than in the USA, as I argued in a recent blog.

Last week I went to a day-long presentation of Adobe CS5 in London, presented by Adobe Evangelists. This is not my opinion of them — this is the genuine job title they carry on their business cards. And they live up their titles: fervent, enthusiastic, excitable, missionary; they tried their level best to whip a somnolent English audience into paroxysms of frenzy with whoops and hollers, at one stage encouraging us to yell “Yee-HAW!” if a particular feature of CS5 caught our approval.

We didn’t. Not because we weren’t impressed, but because we were British. We don’t do “Yee-HAW!” especially when we have to pay 37% more than the Americans to shout “Yee-HAW!”

We just sat there, mute, unresponsive, like London pigeons ignoring the strutting, flaunting cock bird. For, like the pigeons, we all knew that we would end up getting screwed.

In the morning, we were shown the exciting new features in Photoshop CS5. And, in case we weren’t paying attention or we really were dead (as I swear the morning evangelist believed we were) they showed them again to us in the afternoon in a separate seminar. Still, we eventually got the point.

And yes, the new Photoshop has a fabulous new trick called Content Aware which looks at the background of an image, and if you delete something in the foreground you don’t have to be left with an empty hole as you would expect — it will guess at what’s behind and fill it in. You have to see it work, and you can here.

There’s another feature that enables you to pick up hard-to-select parts of an image such as flyaway hair. Very impressive.

But I had other more important concerns. Another new featurette (maybe this was in the page layout package in InDesign, part of CS5) allowed you to attach the Caption (or Keywords, or Description, or other parts of the IPTC dataset) directly to a placed image. Earlier versions of Photoshop have notoriously stripped out the IPTC metadata from an image, not the most useful feature for stock libraries and professional photographers, which are perhaps the audiences at which Photoshop is primarily aimed. So I asked our afternoon Evangelist Terry White if this sinful aberration had been rectified. He blinked cautiously, but then a mouthful of American teeth flashed a “Yes.”

If Terry told me the truth — and how could I doubt an Evangelist? — this is the strongest possible argument for the world upgrading to Adobe CS5. Forget the party tricks; this is what we need from a professional tool. It’s not before time.

Neither I nor anyone else asked if they’d built a more robust version. We didn’t have the heart, after Adobe Bridge crashed twice in the morning sessions. We Brits don’t like to embarrass people.

The relationship between Adobe’s Evangelists and their British audience reminds of the old story of a Frenchman who was caught having sexual relations with a corpse on a beach. Les flics pulled him off and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. “Mon Dieu!” he answered in some shock, “I thought she was English”.

As I complained 6 months ago, it takes a surprising amount of time to compile, so if there are any WordPress experts out there who know how to automate this process, we’d love to hear from you.

If you’re new to fotoLibra, welcome, and may we suggest you read through the HINTS & TIPS section, and if nothing else read Great Expectations. If you enjoy a bit of controversy, read BAPLA Shock Horror.

Comments are welcome, even on old posts, and will be read and often responded to.

When new members join fotoLibra they occasionally ask us questions (prodding us to see if we’re mortal, I suppose). If they do ask, perhaps the most common is “What are people searching for?”

It’s easily answered, and it’s of no commercial use to them or us.

The answer is

1. Sex

2. Breasts

3. Tits

Need I go on?

A professional picture buyer doesn’t do repeated searches anyway, so it’s hard to analyse the information. Most of them simply tell us what they want and leave us to do the searching, which is why we keep rabbiting on to our members about the importance of key words.

When I saw a list of the most pirated ebooks this year I had a feeling I could guess what would be on it. I was not wrong.

These are the books that have been downloaded through BitTorrent between 100,000 and 250,000 times this year:

If you agree with this statement, why not join our group on LinkedIn at http://bit.ly/1HAsKC ?

Photoshop is the tool of choice for most fotoLibra members. At the last count 7,227 fotoLibra members were using Adobe products. If one in ten of you can add your name to this petition we’ll soon have over a thousand.

A substantial constituency. Yet one that is treated with disdain by the Adobe corporation. Pound for dollar, Adobe products have always been around 20 to 40% more expensive in the UK than the US. They claim that support and marketing is more expensive over here.

I don’t believe that. Americans are higher paid and taxed lower than the Brits.

The snappily named website pressefotografforbundet.dk has an intriguing story (fortunately for me, in English) about an entrant in the annual Danish Picture Of The Year competition.

The judges asked to see photographer Klavs Bo Christensen’s RAW files. On comparing them with his entries, they decided his Photoshopping was somewhat on the Extreme side, and they threw him out of the competition.

The competition rules state “Photos submitted to Picture of The Year must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression. The Judges and exhibition committee reserve the right to see the original raw image files, raw tape, negatives and/or slides. In cases of doubt, the photographer can be pulled out of the competition.”

18 months ago I posted a blog complaining that Adobe Photoshop CS3, a tool used by all sides of the picture business, removed metadata such as captions, descriptions and key words from images processed in Photoshop. Which means almost every image.

fotoLibra member John Strain got in touch with us to complain that the latest version, Adobe Photoshop CS4, also strips metadata.

I have recently uploaded several pictures to fotoLibra but found that the metadata did not transfer from Photoshop CS4 to fotoLibra when using fotoLibra DND. This has happened on previous occasions in the odd instance but this time a whole batch had no metadata attached. There are ways around this, rather than having to type all the data in again in to each image window, by copying and pasting but for some reason CS4 does not seem to allow “file info” information to be copied, which is a bit of a bind. You used to be able to copy and paste the information from CS3 but not it seems in CS4. So when it happens now, I type in keywords in to the fotoLibra window for one image and then copy and paste from there if the other images can use the same keywords and delete or add words as necessary.

I wondered if you had come across this before. I don’t know if it is a CS4 problem that meta data is not transferring or a general one.

Well frankly we feel it’s a complaint that should be made to Adobe, as there’s nothing fotoLibra can do about it. So we told him so (nicely, I hope) and he went off to talk to Adobe.

He came back to say:

I have just had a word with Adobe technical support and they were able to help to a degree.

Apparently the metadata cut/copy and paste issue answer is that right clicking on words to cut or copy just doesn’t work. The agent said that metadata is dealt with by a different company from Adobe and the ability to right click on words has not been built in to CS4. He didn’t know why that was and thought it unlikely that it was something which would be addressed.

He pointed out however, that pressing Control + C followed by right click and paste does work. It is a strange anomaly.

In respect of metadata not transferring to fotoLibra I got much the same answer as you did. He said that Photoshop does not support the transferring of metadata to a third-party application. I told him that it sometimes works but usually doesn’t. He suggested that your “page” that might not have been fully updated for CS4. I told him that it was also an issue with CS3 and he suggested that you contact him about it as it may be something which needs to be addressed. I asked for a reference so that you could take it from there if you wish and they would know what it was about but he declined to open a “case” as he said it would be something which fotoLibra would have to raise with them direct. I didn’t get as far as mentioning that you had tried to do so before.

So it does seem to be a recognised problem which Adobe has so far not addressed. It will be helpful though when metadata has not transferred, to be able to copy the words from the file information in the picture and paste them into fotoLibra as I used to be able to do with CS3.

I hope that all this might prove useful to anyone else having similar problems.

I would love to discuss this with the gentleman from Adobe, but I have no way of contacting him. We know the past two releases of Photoshop strip out the phoographers’ metadata. They seem to know it too. Why aren’t they doing anything about it?